Newly released video captures the first hours after Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán was taken into custody, showing the infamous drug kingpin washing his face, answering questions from Mexican authorities and telling officers his cartel would not try to stage a rescue.
El Universal, a Mexican newspaper, published four edited clips of Guzmán shortly after he and his bodyguard, Orso Iván “El Cholo Iván” Gastelum, were arrested after climbing out of a manhole in Los Mochis, Sinaloa, on Jan. 8, 2016.
In one of the videos, Guzmán asks for soap as a police officer guides his hands beneath a dispenser.
He then turns to the officer and asks, “It won’t bother my eyes?”
“It’s better not to get it in your eyes,” the officer responds, before giving him permission to take off his mud-stained tank top.
The footage provides an unusual look at the feared Sinaloa Cartel leader in the tense moments immediately after his capture, years before he was ultimately extradited to the United States.
Concerned that Sinaloa Cartel gunmen might try to locate them, officers took Guzmán and Gastelum to a hotel while they waited for reinforcements, before moving the pair to a military hangar in Mexico City.
In a second video, a haggard and handcuffed El Chapo could be seen sitting in the back of a vehicle and responding, “No,” when asked if they had mistreated him.
Once in Mexico City, El Chapo was grilled by the military and admitted to “dedicating myself to growing marijuana, trafficking since I was young, but not stealing,” according to the footage.
Most strikingly in a third video, the Sinaloa Cartel co-founder assured the military that his squad of assassins had been warned not to launch a rescue operation in the event he was captured.
“It is not convenient for me that people fight with the government,” El Chapo said.
“I have told them — this has an end, if one day I fail, I don’t want them to fight with any police, not at all. No, there will be no war, not at all. I am sure that there will be no war.”
El Chapo’s line of thinking stood in stark contrast to the tactics his criminal organization employed Oct. 17, 2019, when cartel members set roadblocks, burned vehicles and carried out a war-like assault to secure the release of his son.
Ovidio Guzmán López was briefly detained at his home in Culiacán, Sinaloa as part of a US extradition request before then-Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador ordered his release.
In a fourth video, El Chapo and Gastelum could be seen sitting in an airplane with their heads covered.
El Chapo was extradited to US on Jan. 19, 2017 and was convicted by a federal court in Brooklyn on Feb. 12, 2019. He was sentenced to life in prison and is currently being held at ADX Florence — a supermaximum security penitentiary in Florence, Colorado.
